The Test Rig

Testing was done on a fresh install of WinXP Pro, on a system with the following specs:

Motherboard: Shuttle AK31 Rev 3.1 (KT266A)
RAM: 512MB Crucial PC2100 DDR
Hard Drive: Maxtor 20 Gig ATA100 7200 RPM
Video Card: ATI Radeon 7500 65MB DDR (6.13.3276 Drivers)

All of the software we used to test that is freely available to download can be found on our Downloads Page.

First Up: SiSoft Sandra 2001te

Our first benchmark is a synthetic test.  In tests such as these, true real-world applications are not used to guage performance.  Rather, the benchmark application performs its own series of tests, and gives a final result number based on results.  This is a good way to test CPU theory.

First up is the Sandra CPU Benchmark.  As you can see, when clocked at 1.2 Ghz, the Duron and Athlon are neck and neck; nearly identical in performance.  At stock speed, you really begin to see a drop in performance.

The Multimedia tests are interesting.  In the floating point test, the Athlon wins due to raw power.  However, in the integer tests, the Duron 1.1 actually keeps up, and the 1.2 was the overall winner.  This is due to the new streaming SIMD capability of the Morgan core.

The Sandra Memory Benchmark can be used to test more than just your motherboard chipset and memory subsystem! As you can see above, scores can vary wildly depending on the processor used.  Notice that the Athlon's Integer performance is once again below that of the new Duron.

Looking at Sandra scores tells us that when utilized specifically, the new features of the Morgan core certainly do give the Duron a nice advantage.  Whether this equates to real-world performance will be seen later on in this article.  For now, let's have a look at some different synthetic benchmarks that are not targeted to CPU features.

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